SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — Downtown Syracuse has added another key piece to its fast-growing high tech portfolio.
The Syracuse Tech Garden has just opened a brand new hardware center to support light manufacturing.
For its entire 15 years, the Tech Garden has been entirely office space used by software startups as home headquarters.
Rick Clonan, Vice President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at CenterState CEO, and also the person in charge of the Tech Garden said it was time for the facility to take the next step in its evolution.
“It’s been pretty exciting. We knew that we could manufacture in New York, we know we have a lot of teams that want to manufacture. In the past, many of them have outsourced it.”
The Tech Garden’s anchor tenant right now, Density, is one of those companies. It was founded by Central New Yorkers about eight years ago and performed almost all of the company’s functions at the Tech Garden except for manufacturing.
The company was producing its anonymous people counters at a facility in Plano, Texas, just outside of Dallas.
About eight months ago, the Density operations team suggested to the executive team bringing all their light manufacturing to the Syracuse Tech Garden.
Density leadership signed off on the idea and when the space became ready, recently moved operations from Texas to Central New York.
“I would say pride is probably the best term, especially being able to own most of the manufacturing process and keep it at home,” says Density Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Farah.
The devices they’re manufacturing now in Syracuse are small and attached just above a doorway.
Using infrared lasers that spray out, they’re counting people coming in and out of a room.
Farah explains to NewsChannel 9, “And then we turn that data into how buildings get used for large corporate customers. So they can understand this building is underperforming, this building is overperforming, that conference room is always booked but it’s never used.”
He says the three key items to these devices is that they are real-time, accurate and anonymous.
Farah says “I would actually say production will remain permanently, maybe not in this particular location, but I’d say generally we will always manufacture in Upstate New York. “
Clonan adds, ” When they leave that space will now be available to either another Density or maybe four companies, so it’s complete flex space.”
The company currently sells its products in 15 countries but expects that number to jump to nearly 40 by the end of the year.
Density currently employs 42 people and is adding jobs.
Click here if you’d like to see the career opportunities at Density.
